Luogo e data di registrazione		Théâtre Vevey, Vevey (Svizzera): - 11-18 giugno 1968 (Opp. 127 & 135) - 11-19 aprile 1969 (Opp. 130 & 133)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Vittorio Negri | Tony Buczynski
	Edizione LP		Philips | 6768 341 | 2 LPs
	Prima Edizione CD		Vedi link alla prima edizione in long playing.
	Note		La collana "Musica da Camera" della Philips riedita negli anni '80 alcune registrazioni del Quartetto Italiano.

THE LATE STRING QUARTETS I WITH "GROSSE FUGE," OP. 133 During the last five years of his life, from 1822 to 1827, Beethoven was occupied with the composition of five string quartets that are the mighty summit of his achievement in the sphere of chamber music. The revival of his interest in the string quartet after a dozen years during which he had neglected it completely was due mainly to an enquiry from Prince Nicholas Galitsin, who visited Vienna in 1822 and asked him to write three quartets. The first of the three works resulting from this commission was Op. 127 in E flat, composed between 1822 and 1825, first performed by Schuppanzigh, Holz, Weiss, and Linke on March 3, 1825, and published by Schott in Mainz in March 1826. Its expansive first movement begins with a slow introduction that reappears, in modified form, at the end of the exposition and half-way through the development. The sublime Adagio (in A flat) is a gigantic theme with variations, although not so described in the score, and the finale, which follows after a dramatic scherzo, is remarkable for having a coda that actually moves at a slower pace than the remainder of the movement. The second quartet in order of composition (though not of publication) was Op. 132 in A minor, which was begun towards the end of 1824 and finished in July 1825, first performed by the Schuppanzigh Quartet on November 6, 1825, and published by Schlesinger in Berlin in September 1827. Its fifth and last movement was originally planned as the finale of the Ninth Symphony, but the quartet stems more immediately from Beethoven’s serious illness during the winter of 1824-25, and the slow movement refers directly to his recovery the following summer. The third Galitsin quartet was Op. 130 in B flat (composed between August and November 1825, first performed by the Schuppanzigh Quartet on March 21, 1826, and published by Artaria in Vienna in May 1827 - two months after Beethoven’s death). In its original form the quartet had as its sixth and final movement the colossal “Grosse Fuge," but when some members of the audience at the first performance complained that it was disproportionately long for the rest of the work, Beethoven, with surprising meekness, allowed himself to be persuaded to replace it with a movement of more normal dimensions; this new finale (which is played here after the “Grosse Fuge" on Side 4, so that listeners can have the quartet in both forms) was written between September and November 1826. Beethoven never witnessed the first performance of the quartet in its final form since this did not take place until April 22, 1827. At Artaria’s instigation Beethoven issued the rejected finale (as “Grande Fugue, tantôt libre, tantôt recherchée”) as a separate work, with a separate opus number (133), both for string quartet and for piano duet, with a dedication to his staunch friend, patron, and pupil, Archduke Rudolph, but the edition appeared only in May 1827. In some ways Op, 130, with its extensive and varied sequence of movements, is more like a celestial divertimento than an orthodox quartet. It begins with a complex Allegro, much influenced (and several times interrupted by) the music of its short slow introduction. Next comes a minuscule Presto in B flat minor and an extraordinarily graceful and tender Andante in D flat. The fourth movement is an appealing Allegro assai in G (“in the style of a German dance”), originally intended as the second movement of Op. 132 and first sketched in A, the fifth an incomparable Cavatina (in E flat), of which Beethoven is reported to have said that he had never written a melody that affected him so much. The replacement finale is a cross between a sonata movement and a rondo, its persistent main theme recalling the deliberately “Russian” manner bf the “Rasoumovsky” quartets of 1806. The “Grosse Fuge,” falls into three main sections - an angular double fugue, a slow middle section, and a scherzo-like one in 6/8 - framed by an introductory Overtura and a retrospective and cumulative coda. Although Op. 127, Op. 130, and Op. 132 are linked by their common dedication to Prince Galitsin, there is a closer musical bond between Op. 130, Op. 131, and Op. 132, since they share a “motto” of four notes: the top four notes of the harmonic minor scale, in which the intervals are a semitone, an augmented second, and a semitone - though these notes are used in various groupings. Op. 131 in C sharp minor, which Beethoven considered to be his finest quartet, was begun late in 1825, and completed within the first six months of 1826; it does not appear to have been performed in public during Beethoven’s lifetime, and was published by Schott in June 1827, with a dedication to Baron Joseph von Stutterheim (who had secured for Beethoven’s nephew Karl a place in his regiment after the latter’s attempted suicide in January 1827). The Quartet in F, Op. 135, the last that Beethoven wrote, occupies an isolated position among the five great works for the medium that he composed during the last six or seven years of his life. It dates from the summer of 1826, and was performed for the first time at a memorial concert organised by Joseph Linke on March 23, 1828 - almost exactly a year after Beethoven’s death - in the Musikvereinsaal in Vienna. It was published by Schlesinger in September 1827, with a dedication to Johann Nepomuk Wolfmayer, a cloth merchant by trade but an ardent amateur musician and one of Beethoven’s most loyal friends during the composers last years; Wolfmayer was originally intended as the dedicatee of Op. 131, and Beethoven was anxious to make amends to him, and appears to have done so at the instigation of Karl Holz, who told him that the dedication of Op. 135 to him (Wolfmayer) "would be the happiest event in his life." Although its first, second, and fourth movements (the last of which opens with an introduction entitled “The difficult decision,” whose theme Beethoven jotted down in his notebook an an accompaniment to his housekeeper’s demand for money) are relatively lightweight in character, Beethoven never reached greater heighths of poetry than in the miraculous Lento in D flat, which forms the quartet’s third movement. Robin Golding

Illustration: Karl Friedrich Lessing (1808-1880) "Landschaft" (Kunsthalle, Bremen)